Unhoused

Don't count the CIA out yet, but do look for Congress to at least focus its attention on whether the idiocy of intelligence as practiced is worth $100 billion a year when -- as the underfed, the unhoused, the uncared for sick and the ill-educated can attest -- there are one or two places where the money could be put to better use.

Suffice it to say that The Ghosts of Versailles conceives of late-eighteenth-century French history and culture as suspended in a limbo of wraiths and unhoused plot possibilities, in which Beaumarchais's unfinished La Mere coupable (after The Barber of Seville and The Marriage of Figaro) is a pretext for plots and counterplots involving Almaviva, Figaro and Susanna from the world of imagination, and Beaumarchais, Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette from the real world of history.

When you consider the way government treated the Windrush generation, the refusal to admit child refugees, the poor forced to use foodbanks, the sick waiting on hospital trolleys, the disabled denied basic support, our children in underfunded schools and the Grenfell victims still unhoused, while the rich are given tax cuts and billions are lost every year through tax avoidance, it isn't impossible to conclude that Theresa May's government lacks basic human empathy.

You've got maggots white and wriggling, unhoused; you've got poor Bob retching his guts out after the first full pass.

Both the Rupa and TSAR editions begin with "Relocation" - "Scraping it all back: //A species of composition / routine as crossing streets / or taking out the garbage / nothing to blow the mind" - clearly a poem for a hip American audience, and they both end with the same poem in the section, "San Andreas Fault," indicating again an American setting for this much-traveled, supposedly "unhoused" or diaspora poet.

The unhoused in our community must scramble to find a safe and dry place to rest, and that does not even include the hope of getting warm.

The end result will be students unhoused and dropping out."

Wright also tries to observe Pound's principle that poets should "Be influenced by as many great artists as you can," since almost every one of his poems contains an allusion to another poet or a painter; but he is not always careful to observe Pound's corollary, to "have the decency either to acknowledge the debt outright, or to try to conceal it," for there are thinly disguised and badly mangled borrowings from poets as diverse as Dylan Thomas ("The force that measles the peach tree") and Eliot ("unhoused and peregrine") and Keats ("City of masks and minor frightfulness").

According to Aristotle, necessity is what governs us when we are hungry, unhoused or vulnerable to enemies.

As one of the most literally unhoused of postcolonial writers--or, one might say, multiply displaced and replaced--Alexander reveals throughout her mature work a repeated fixation on not only her two ancestral homes in Kerala but all manner of other spaces wherein human relationships can occur.

Proceeds benefit local efforts to house the unhoused; fcceugene.org.